Review by Mack Hassler
“…the novel is a reflection upon its own nature”
Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, 1963
Usually in good fiction there is an autobiographical impulse that may be seen in the mode of storytelling. In his later novels and stories, the great Romantic master of the 1930s Wolfe Thomas, who had captured the scene with Look Homeward, Angel (1929), changed the name of his key character from Eugene Gant to George Webber in order to emphasize the sense of a web or “wovenness” in his work. Jack Austin in his self-confidence and eagerness to speak when I first met him a year ago at the 2024 UPPAA conference, with his award-winning first novel in hand, seemed like a Yooper Wolfe. Victor Volkman in his review that appeared shortly wondered how a St Louis boy could know so much about the UP. When asked, Austin replied that he and his father had moved to Houghton about the time he began to write and “… still feel that my developing voice fits the Keweenaw….” In this second collection that Volkman has quickly decided to publish (just as the great editor Maxwell Perkins immediately saw the commercial value of Wolfe) the themes are universal and grimly Finn “sisu”—growing old and learning to die in the North as well as learning to live in the harsh isolation far from the City without succumbing to the loneliness, plus a good dose of the Oedipal Father image when the only parent one has is the Father.
Austin opens What You Find In the Woods & Other Stories, this new “weaving” of his fictional voice with one of the most powerful themes, and the story frankly made me cry because the narration was a lovely duet of a man and his wife at the end of their lives caring for each other as both their minds and their bodies move toward the inevitable shutdown. They talk to each other as they care for each other, and what they talk about are the details of who will pass away first. Every human couple will have to address this dilemma if their marriage lasts, and I have also seen it played out with my old dogs who have always lived with one another. My wife and I had exactly this set of communications as she was dying several years ago. I like Austin; and I am very grateful, also, that he wrote up this theme so powerfully in his piece that opens the book “The Bottom of the Cider Barrel.” I think he gets the last sentences just right. I won’t quote it all. The speaker is the wife: “He strokes your hair and kisses your forehead and tells you he loves you over and over. Eventually all the sounds blend together—You slept, and when you awoke you were ravenously hungry, and a young Roger was there snoring next to you and you realized, thank goodness, that you were dead,” p. 21. This speaker of Austin’s did not have my wife’s name and my name is not “Roger”. But I think the speech captures the death of my wife well.
The second story in the collection is just as powerful, and it is about a lengthy death as well: “Down the #5 Road.” Later there are a few weaknesses in the book, but not in the start. Jake is a rugged hockey goalie with a single father, who will return in the next two stories (Jake’s parents have split but that will be an issue for several later stories that Jake has to deal with). Right now Jake has retreated to a remote cabin in Copper Country by the old mining road curving out of swamp and up a ridge named in the title. He has wifi and a cool female therapist he can text because he wants the isolation to heal from hip surgery needed because of crashing into someone on the ice. The isolation bores him, however. We get the sense that Jake has trouble with girls. They like him. But he is afraid to commit probably due to the failed marriage of his own mother and father. A lot more of this issue in other nice Oedipal stories later in the book and, especially, in the title story of the book which will be my next paragraph. Here Jake’s boredom leads him off to a local bar, some fighting, some involvement with drugs (most coke as we see in several stories later in the book) and eventually pushing, or rather gunning a hot pickup truck, through the swamp and up and into a snow drift near the mine on road #5. I think Robeert Traver died this way by ramming his truck into a snow bank. In any case, Jake’s death by freezing and found by the cops the next morning is well-paced and a fine story to read. Well-made and exciting stories. And I think the reader will like his characters. Austin is becoming a good weaver of fiction.
Playing hockey in the big cities, as well as being isolated in remote locations up North, join to define the overall subject matter of this collection. The key story for thus unity which carries the same title as the title of the book strangely comes in the middle of the collection. So with his two opening stories plus this powerful and unifying piece set midway, even though poor Jake was a goalie in hockey, Austin scores a “hat trick” for the book. Pretty good weaving. A couple couples from Chicago, the men of which had all played hockey together in the City (many Yoopers have family and connections with Chicago) accept an invitation to come up to Three Lakes—a little South of Copper Country and just a bit West of Marquette Country where the third hockey player has retreated like Jake to be alone with his emotions. Jay’s cabin has no heat except for a wood stove. The women with their men from Chicago bitch a lot about how cold it is. The big issue that is well-developed in this story is whether or not it is better to live alone in the cold with “sisu” and with therapy and your emotions or to have the wider socialization in the City. Several of the stories after this central thematic story deal with the bus system in Chicago. So it must not be said that Austin writes only about the UP. This collection has a lot to say about Chicago, which fascinated Wolfe too in his Webber weavings.
But in this thematic story centered in What You Find in the Woods & Other Stories there is a key image or symbol that is so good and so poignant that I want to end my review with it. The symbol, also, reminds us of the power in the death images and the effectiveness of those in the opening stories of the book. The vacationing couples from the City decide they want to go Ice Fishing, so they drag their gear out on to the largest of the Three Lakes and bore a hole in the ice. The women bitching all the time about the temperature. They catch only one fish—a fairly small lake trout but very fat. A good Yooper knows that the fish ought to be killed as soon as it comes out of the water if one is going to keep it. The city women have no idea how to do this, but the fish looks fat and so they want to keep it and take it back to the warmth of the cabin and the wood stove and have it for dinner. They don’t have a proper weight, and so they end up swinging it by its tail till they have bludgeoned it to death. They find inside the fish, of course, that the reason it is so large is that it is pregnant. I think this is a perfect image for the collection by Jack Austin. It captures predation and generation going on in Nature at the same time. Therapy and Death. Chicago as well as the safe and reflective retreat to Three Lakes. With just a touch of humor, I think Austin is grooming himself for some very fine writing. Read him.
- Publisher : Modern History Press (February 10, 2025)
- Paperback : 184 pages
- ISBN-13 : 979-889656021
- List: $21.95
